One of the aspects of mass customization is to provide customers with
products that are manufactured to their needs and requirements. To
provide such support requires better integration of the customer into
different stages of design and manufacturing. Expansion of the Internet
provides an opportunity for such an integration, which will need to
link design and manufacturing of the company with the customer. In
current approaches, customers usually specify the options and get the
price or simple pictures of the object. In this paper we present a
framework in which customer options and size parameters are gathered
using the Internet. It is used to automatically generate a
3-dimensional computer-aided design model of the product, estimate the
price of the product, and generate assembly sequence information. The
framework for mass customization of products necessitates information
management among different segments of the company and the customer.
The Internet-based system presented in this paper uses a graph grammar
and templates to explicitly maintain correspondence among various types
of product information from a module perspective. The system is
demonstrated using a customizable coffeemaker product family.